Project Halo is a staged research effort by Vulcan Inc. towards the development of a Digital Aristotle, an application capable of producing user and domain-appropriate answers and justifications to novel (previously unseen) questions in an ever-growing number of domains.
The Digital Aristotle will differentiate itself from current search engine technology in a number of important ways. First, search engines require that a specific text containing the answer to a users query reside somewhere in the searched corpus. Next, the document containing the correct answer must reside fairly high among the ranked lists of documents it returns given the users specified keywords. And finally, the user needs to scan each document for the appropriate passage.
Since the Digital Aristotle generates custom answers to every question, it is capable of answering questions for which text currently does not exist in some document. By returning that answer to the user it eliminates the extra steps of producing ranked lists of documents and their subsequent scanning.
The Digital Aristotles ability to produce user and domain appropriate justifications will promote the end users trust that the answers generated by the application are indeed correct.

Friedland, Noah and Allen, Paul, and Mathews, Gavin and Whitbrock, Michael, and Baxter, David and Curtis, Jon and Shepard, Blake and Miraglia, Pierluigi and Angele, Jurgen and Staab, Stephen, and Moench, Eddie and Opperman, Henrik and Wenke, Dirk and Israel, David and Chaudhri, Vinay and Porter, Bruce and Barker, Ken and Fan, James and Chaw, Shaw Yi and Yeh, Peter, Tecuci, Dan and Clark, Peter. Project Halo: Towards a Digital Aristotle. AI Magazine, 2004. [PDF, Details]

Friedland, Noah S. and Allen, Paul G. and Witbrock, Michael and Mathews, Gavin and Salay, Nancy and Miraglia, Pierluigi and Angele, Jurgen and Staab, Stephen and Israel, David and Chaudhri, Vinay and Barker, Ken and Porter, Bruce and Clark E. Peter. Towards a Quantitative Platform Independent Analysis of Knowledge Systems, in Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Systems, 2004. [PDF, Details]

Barker, K. and Chaudhri, V., Chaw, Sha Yi and Clark, Peter E. and Fan, James and Israel, David and Mishra, Sunil and Porter, Bruce and Romero, Pedro and Tecuci, Dan and Yeh, Peter. A Question Answering System for AP Chemistry: Assessing KR Technologies, in Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, June 2-4 2004. [PDF, Details]